This study focuses on a draft letter by Ḥusayn b. ʿAbd al-Ṣamad al-ʿĀmilī (d. 984/1576) for his teacher Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī (d. 965/1558); both were prominent Twelver Shiite jurists from the region of Jabal ʿĀmil in what is now Lebanon. Yūsuf Ṭabājah, who first published the text, argued that Ḥusayn wrote the letter while he was in Iraq c. 957/1550 and that it describes Zayn al-Dīn's legal work al-Rawḍah al-bahiyyah. It is argued here that the book in question is more likely Zayn al-Dīn's work Tamhīd al-qawāʿid, on legal and grammatical maxims, and that the letter dates to c. 958/1551. The text provides insight into the relationship between Ḥusayn and Zayn al-Dīn and the culture of scholarly correspondence.

Co-occurrence restrictions on Biblical Hebrew root consonants have received thorough treatment in the specialized literature. However, combinations involving glides on the one hand, and nominal roots on the other, have received very little attention. The aim of this paper is to argue for an incompatibility between medial consonants and final glides in defective nouns: a final w cannot generally follow a homorganic medial root consonant, viz. labial p, b, m and velar k, g, q. The III-w roots are rare: they came about as a result of a well-documented historical process and are found almost only in nominal roots. Previous investigations have overlooked this incompatibility owing to the incomplete scope of the studies.

This is the first publication of the astronomical diary BM 30617 from Babylon. This clay tablet shows an example of “preliminary diaries”, which record primary observations of the sky and, if any, the Euphrates for one month or less. The cuneiform text of BM 30617 shows the primary day-by-day observations of the sky over the first four days of the Babylonian month IX (Kislīm). The recorded phenomena are dated to an unknown year during the joint kingship of Antiochus and his son (or stepson), also named Antiochus, of the Seleucid dynasty. Some clues in the diary, however, help us to narrow down the candidates for the year to which our month IX belongs.

The Middle Persian text The Explanation of Chess and the Invention of Backgammon (WČ) is dated to the reign of Xusrō I. It describes a contest between the Persian and Indian kings represented by their leading wise men. The famous sage Wuzurgmihr defeats his Indian counterpart at chess and invents the game of backgammon, the board being given cosmological significance with the turning of the counters and roll of the die corresponding to fate. This article presents a new textual source where many of the same themes are evident: the courtly context, the competition between rival sages from Persia and India, the interpretation in terms of cosmology and fate. However, this new source is from the fourth century ce or earlier and the personages involved are different, raising vital questions about the history of the topic and its development in Persian and other late antique literatures.

This paper describes the inverse marking systems of two closely related Khroskyabs varieties, Siyuewu and Wobzi, and hypothesizes the historical development of the Khroskyabs inverse marking system. I propose that a hypothetical prefix, *Cə-, which is probably related to the second person markers attested in many Trans-Himalayan languages, existed in Proto-Khroskyabs, and that it has different reflexes in the two modern Khroskyabs varieties.

The present paper discusses the hypothesis according to which a devoicing sound shift *sb- > sp-, *sd- > st-, *sg- > sk- took place in pre-Tibetan. I show that all examples supporting this putative sound shift have better explanations, and that this hypothesis creates more problems than it solves. In addition, I discuss data from modern Tibetic varieties, showing that no typological parallel for such a sound shift is attested.

The present paper provides a systematic description of interjections in a moribund Eastern Kalahari Khoe language – Tjwao. After analysing original evidence within a prototype-driven approach, the authors conclude the following: (a) in Tjwao, the interjectional lexical class constitutes an internally diverse category confined between the canonical centre and a non-prototypical periphery; and (b) primary emotive interjections exhibit the highest degree of canonicity and extra-systematicity, while the canonicity and extra-systematicity of secondary phatic interjections is lowest.